Refugees Vs. Immigrants

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WASHINGTON — It's the '90s version of President Ronald Reagan's famous welfare queen from the ghetto: a brand-new immigrant in a spectacular fur coat, buying groceries with food stamps.

She - it's always a she - has been widely spotted in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the sight of her prompts letters of outrage to government officials.

At a time when native Americans are being forced off the welfare rolls and into workfare or educational programs, we still appear to be giving welfare to immigrants. That's not supposed to be the American Dream - or the American law. Immigrants are not admissible if they are likely to go on welfare. Under welfare reform in 1996, aged and impoverished noncitizens now face the loss of Supplemental Security Insurance, Medicaid and other benefits.

This week, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service announced tough new rules requiring immigrant sponsors to prove they can support any family members they bring into the country. And if the new immigrant needs emergency public assistance, governments can sue the sponsors to recover the full amount.

But there's still one loophole staring you in the face: that woman in the fur coat. Even under the new rules, refugees are still entitled to receive welfare upon arrival. Their relatives in the United States cannot be held financially responsible for them.

In New York, which took in 133,168 legal immigrants in 1996 (more than twice as many as any other U.S. city), 22,000 were classed as refugees. The biggest single refugee group consists of Jews from Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan in the former Soviet Union. Second, nationwide, are the Vietnamese. Cubans are third.

Under the 1989 Lautenberg amendment, Jews and Pentecostal Christians are still admitted as refugees - six years after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union - on the grounds that they fear religious persecution in their homelands.

Some of them certainly have justification. Though the State Department records no state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union, there have been occasional incidents of synagogue bombings, desecration of cemeteries and job discrimination. But to qualify as refugees, individuals don't have to prove that they have personally suffered; they need only say they have reason to fear persecution. In fact, hardly anybody is turned down except for blatant fraud.

This may have been a defensible practice while the Soviet Union was disintegrating. But it really stretches the definition of religious persecution to continue it today - especially with new rules that make immigration standards so much tougher for non-refugee immigrants, including other Jews.

With its new regulations, the U.S. government has created not only two classes of immigrants - those entitled to public benefits and those not - but two classes of U.S. residents: those who will be held financially responsible for their immigrant relatives and those who have no such burden.

This violates any sense of fairness.

The rewards for being a refugee, rather than an ordinary immigrant, have suddenly skyrocketed. With this sharp new distinction in the way we treat immigrants and their American relatives, we ought to be sure that refugee status is based on persecution - and not simply on outdated Cold War politics. Otherwise we invite replicating here the same resentments the refugees purport to be fleeing.